If you are using Beam Us Up, just enter your site’s address in the URL field and hit ‘Start’.

The crawler will start working away in the background while we continue with the audit.

Sidenote.

We’re currently working on major updates to our Domain Health and Crawl Report tools. We expect to relaunch the tools later this year, which will allow you to view a full crawl report from within your Ahrefs account.

Step 2: Check That Only 1 Version Of The Site Is Browseable

Consider all the ways someone could type your website address into a browser (or link to it).

For example:

http://yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com

https://yourdomain.com

https://www.yourdomain.com

Only one of these should be accessible in a browser. The others should be 301 redirected to the canonical version.

In Simple Life Insure’s case, there’s a problem.

You can browse the site at both http://

and https://

So that’s something that needs to be fixed as a priority.

Recommendation

We would recommend you use https:// (either www or non www) as there is a slight rankings boost for SSL enabled sites. Plus, it also keeps your site secure and increases trust.

You can get a free SSL certificate for your site from Let’s Encrypt.

Either way, make sure that your site is only accessible through one URL.

All other versions should be 301 redirected.

Step 3: Manually Check Home Page SEO

Let’s start by looking at a few on-page fundamentals.

We’ll go to the site’s home page in a browser and right click to view the source.

We’re just going to have a quick check on some basic on-page SEO here. To make things easy we’ll ask a few questions:

Does the page contain a well crafted, clickable title. Does it conform to SEO best practices?

Is there a custom meta description? Is it optimised for maximising click-throughs?

Is there one instance of the H1 tag? Does it conform to SEO best practices?

Are subheaders (H2, H3 etc) properly used and conforming to SEO best practices?

Let’s find out the answers.

Check The Home Page Title Tag

The title tag remains the single most important on-page ranking factor in 2016.

In his excellent title tag best practice guide, Shaun Anderson of Hobo Web explains

The Page Title Tag (or more accurately the HTML Title Element) is still, however, arguably the most important on-page seo factor to address on any web page. Keywords in page titles can HELPyour pages rank higher in Google results pages (SERPS). The page title is also often used by Google as the title of a search snippet link in search engine results pages. Keywords in page titles often end up as links to your web page.

The meta description is one of your last hopes on search engine results pages (SERPs) to attract a searcher to come to your site. This is something that digital marketers constantly neglect to focus on — perhaps because they think it just doesn’t matter anymore. But if you’re not putting effort into your meta descriptions, you could be missing out on good website traffic that can bring in lots of new leads and customers.

Step 5: Check Content Is Unique

Content duplicated across multiple pages on your site is bad. But when it’s duplicated on other websites it’s even worse.

You can easily find potential duplicate content issues across the web with a premium Copyscape account. For $10 you can check up to 200 URLs using their batch tool.

Here’s the process.

Grab the URLs from your crawl report and paste them into the batch tool.

Click add and the tool will verify the number of URLs you entered. It will also give an approximate time for the batch scan to complete.

When it’s done you’ll get a list of all scanned URLs showing the number of duplicate content matches and a colour coded “Risk” score.

You can click an individual URL to see the matches.

Looks like in this case the issue is simply the text disclaimer in the footer of the site.

That shouldn’t be a problem on most pages.

But it might be on category pages where there is very little unique content.

Recommendation

There are a couple of solutions.

Firstly, the text disclaimer could be replaced with an image.

That certainly gets rid of the duplicate content problem. But it doesn’t address the issue of the category pages having very little unique content of their own. They might still get flagged by Panda (or at least struggle to rank).

So, the better solution would be to beef up the category pages by adding a unique introduction. Doing that will increase the unique content on the page, mitigating the boilerplate text.

And as a bonus, it may help to boost the rankings of the category pages themselves.

Step 6: Run Some Tests On Google

We’ll now head over to Google to run some searches.

Search For Brand

First of all, we’ll do a search for the site’s brand.

Unless a site is very new (or the brand is a very generic phrase), I would expect to see it rank at position 1.

If not then this is a strong indication of deeper problems, such as heavy algorithmic or manual penalties.

Simple Life Insure actually rank at position 2:

The site is relatively new, so it’s probably not anything to be overly concerned about.

But it does indicate to me that Google might not completely trust the brand yet.

Perform A Search Using The “site:” Operator

Next we’ll perform a search using the site: operator, which will show us how many pages Google currently has indexed for the domain.

This can be a good early indicator of indexing issues.

The format for the search is “site:yourdomain.com” without the quotes.

We can see that there are currently 177 pages included in the index for this domain.

That seems a little high considering our crawl only discovered 92 URLs.

If we scroll down we can see there are quite a few “junk” pages that we’ll want to get rid of.

For example, there are lots of tag pages indexed:

These have no content on them and should be removed from the index.

Again, we can easily manage that through YOAST by adding noindex,follow to all tag pages with one click.

It’s well worth scrolling through to find other thin/low quality pages to remove from Google’s index.

Editor’s note

For the next part of the audit process we will switch sites to ToyUniverse.com.au — a toy retailer from Australia.

For traffic illustration we will be looking at data from last year.

Step 7: Analyse Search Traffic

Clearly the aim of any SEO audit is to identify ways to increase a website’s traffic. So it makes sense to take a look at how the site is currently performing.

We’ll run a few reports in Google Analytics to give us a quick overview.

First we’ll look at the site’s current search traffic.

The data for August 2015 shows an average of around 250 visitors a day from search.

Acquisition > Overview > Organic Search

From the same report, we can click on “Landing Page” to discover which pages are currently bringing in the most search traffic.

A broad spread of landing pages (in this case there are 1,265) would suggest the site is in reasonable health.

Finally, we will set a wide range (I’m going to go back to July 2013) and view traffic by week. We’re looking for any noticeable spikes, or dips in traffic.

In this case we can see some big spikes at the end of each year, followed by drops in January. I suspect that’s down to the seasonal nature of the product as generally traffic has been pretty stagnant over the period.

Of course, in other cases, a drop in traffic may be indicative of a Google penalty. That’s something we will take a closer look at shortly.

Step 9: Check The “Curve”

The overview report in Ahrefs Site Explorer gives us some useful information on the general direction of travel for the site. We can get some quick visual feedback on whether our SEO efforts are having a positive impact on rankings and traffic.

We’ll start by entering the domain into Site Explorer and clicking ‘Explore’.

Site Explorer > Enter domain > Explore

This will take us to the overview report for the domain.

The number of referring domains pointing to the website has been steadily increasing, which is good to see.

Next we’ll click on the “Organic Search” tab and take a look at keywords and estimated traffic.

We can see that there has been an increase in both. Although there does appear to have been a dip in rankings between April and July this year, which has now recovered.

Tip

These reports are particularly useful for newer sites, where improvements in rankings may not yet have resulted in increased traffic.

If we can see that keywords and traffic are moving steadily upwards we can assume that continuing our SEO efforts will soon yield positive results.

Just enter your URL in the free tool, hit “Analyse” and Google will return a speed ‘score’ for your site (out of 100) for both mobile and desktop. They will also give you a list of other areas they think you can improve.

In our case, the site gets a score of 57/100 for mobile and 71/100 for desktop. Not the worst I’ve seen, but definite room for improvement!

Why is Structured Data important?

Examples of content that may benefit from the inclusion of structured data include:

Reviews

Product information

Events

Although, you can mark up most types of content to a certain degree (just don’t spam!).

Additionally, the correct use of structured data allows Google to better understand your content. Nathan Yerian puts it well here.

Structured data allows search engines to not only crawl your site, but to truly understand it. Yes, even search engines can have a tough time deciphering web page content. Some elements that seem perfectly obvious to us humans are meaningless to web crawlers.

But if something is very low quality and simply not worth the hassle of updating, then go ahead and delete it. Just be sure to set up a 301 redirect to a relevant page so you don’t lose any link equity.

Pro Tip

Another thing to look out for is multiple pieces of content targeting the same keyword. That’s known as “keyword cannibalisation”.

Ideally only one page on your site should target each keyword.

A good tactic is to combine multiple posts targeting the same keyword into one, super authoritative post. We recently combined 3 posts into one to create our definitive guide to anchor text.

And… You’re Done!

Our SEO audit is complete!

By following these steps you should have uncovered a number of changes you can make to your site to improve your rankings.

A full forensic SEO audit is a much lengthier process (taking anything from a few hours to a few days, depending on the size of the site). But this process is a great way to kick start any new SEO campaign and get a feel for how a site is currently set up.

If we wanted to continue digging, we could now go back to the crawler which we started at the beginning of this process, and take a more detailed look at the site’s structure, internal linking, other on-page factors etc.

We may also return to Ahrefs at this point to more thoroughly investigate the site’s link profile and look for additional keyword opportunities.

But, in this case, we’ll leave that for another day…

Consider that 800lb gorilla well and truly banished!

Over To You

If you have any questions about the audit process, or have any tips you would like to share, then please leave a comment below.